


Soused! an East End Guide to Local Liquors

by menocchio



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:13:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27149222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/menocchio/pseuds/menocchio
Summary: This is where Alfie starts his journey.
Relationships: Tommy Shelby/Alfie Solomons
Comments: 5
Kudos: 33
Collections: Good Intentions: Abandoned and Unfinished WIPs





	Soused! an East End Guide to Local Liquors

**Author's Note:**

> Started writing this one back in the... spring of 2019? while my mother was sick. Always hoped to finish it but it's been so long now, I very much doubt I will. Really bugs me, because I think this one would've been my favorite.

Alfie wonders about beauty, sometimes.

The boys way back, they used to go, Alfie, you're so soft, you'll never make it in this world. But soft flesh grows calloused when hit enough, and soft minds grow sharp when hacked to the essentials. And then what do you have in the war but finding a taste for blood and a tolerance for filth the likes your mother would never countenance at her dinner table, a table you'll never return to, and you think that'd be the end, lesson learned, but you'd be wrong, like the boys were wrong, because Alfie found beauty in the war too.

You take a man, right: strutting, chest full of strange notions about glory and national pride – fantasies all – and you throw him in the trenches. Get him so he don't remember the last time he ate with clean hands or took a shit that didn't disconcert his better senses. Take the man's soul and shred it like a piece of cotton dragged over hill, catching and tearing on every last stone or thorn by the wayside. Make him question God, and the sun, and the safety of his next breath and his next (and his next). Now, once you've broken him down, this rotten deteriorated shell of a man, Alfie's afraid you have to kill him. No way around it. That's the nature of the situation, he don't make the rules. So then you've got this lad – for you see now he is just a lad, just a stupid boy but still a killer too, can never forget that because he sure won't – and the lad's dying and it hurts. The despair is too much to be borne. It's swift and opportunistic like the flu, can find a home in any man's chest. When it speaks, it sounds like it has always spoken his tongue, and it only ever says the same thing: the end. _Sorry, this is what you get: anonymity in the mud, they'll never even recover your body_. And as this thought crosses the lad's mind, and the last drabs of vitality slip away: that indefinable whisp of a dream he might have called his life, the boy, this murderer of other boys – he calls out for his mum.

Alfie thinks that's beauty.  
  


* * *

  
The Rat's Hat is a scummy pub on the edge of the River Lea over in Limehouse, frequented by a mean clattering of foreign sailors off disreputable ships: stinking whalers with slovenly decks and abusive captains. You knew the last by the bruises on their faces and the dull dart of their eyes.

The perpetual damp and stink of the sewage flowing into the river nearby had sunk into the grain of the place, into the floors and walls and tables, leaving a tacky grime that clung to the pads of one's fingers, got into one's nose and stayed here until you wanted to bloody it for the sake of smelling something else. But the pub was neutral ground, Chinese territory, mostly – neither the Jews nor the Italians, nor any other outfit that had been a combatant in recent memory could lay claim to it.

This is where Alfie starts his journey.

He begins with a clear liquor from an unidentifiable mash, a near-blinding concoction surely made by the desperate or desperately incompetent. He plays cards, placing bold bets and socking a man in the jaw who calls him on cheating. He has an eye to lose in the end anyway; his real thirst is for violence.

Must've been some blackstrap in that mash, he remembers thinking somewhere between the flip of cards.

After sinking the sun, he stumbles out to kip for a few hours in a cramped side alley between a warehouse and machine shop. Five fitful hours later, reeling and staggering hateful against the rough slick brickwork, he gets up and does it all over again.

Somewhere between the second and third day, a vision of Ollie swims up before him. The boy is saying something, tone plaintive, and looking more gawky than usual against the backdrop of the bar. The senseless noise of his voice makes Alfie lash out until the vision goes away again.

The wars are all over, and Alfie is left with no one to battle but himself. Finally: a proper fucking enemy.

The Gypsy finds him on the seventh day. He carries in his hand a squat bottle of unlabelled clear liquor.

  
  


** I. Gin **  
_for the eradication of seemingly incurable sadness_

  
  


Tommy Shelby is as put-together as he gets, which is saying something. Alfie almost disregards him as a hallucination, but that's definitely a smear of horseshit affixed to his left shoe, so he must be real. Gorgeous Mister Shelby, standing right here in Alfie's hideaway hovel, wrapped up like a present. A present what's stepped in horseshit.

Usually the facade amuses Alfie: the careful construction and incredible bleeding effort of it all. Today he buys it. Lately, he thinks even Tommy is buying it, which can only mean they're rapidly approaching some sort of end, some final scene setting in Tommy's journey from gutter to glory.

Tommy Shelby, a fine upstanding man of Britannia. Tommy Shelby, OB-fucking-E. When does the industrialist start rejecting the label of gangster and all those associated with it?

Tommy said a while back that he was having trouble seeing clearly; his new eyeglasses seem to give him a marksman's aim as he studies Alfie. He wonders if the glasses show him anything special. The future? The past? Perhaps they let him see precisely what is right in front of him. Alfie thinks that would be a neat trick.

He takes his time dragging his gaze up the length of the combed wool and white starched shirt before finally meeting those cold blue eyes. Looking directly into them is always a little like being flayed alive, and Alfie's just enough of a sick fuck to love it and always come back for more.

He drops his gaze after only a moment, dismissive and bored and making a show of it. “Tommy, be a chivalrous lad and pour me another drink, yeah?”

He's having trouble making out the face card in his hand, even though surely playing cards were designed with the inebriated in mind. Is it a Queen or a Jack? The Jack's always been a bit too pretty for his own fucking good, hasn't he?

Tommy doesn't move, and his low, dark voice rolls down on Alfie's shoulders like God's thunder. “I received a telephone call three days ago. You must imagine my surprise, Alfie, when I found your assistant on the other end, requesting my assistance.”

Fucking Ollie. He sees you bargain with a man threatening to blow up your place one time and thinks it means you're engaged to the fuck.

Alfie shifts to look up again but checks himself in time. “And he asked you to fetch me, did he? Ollie's a good lad, but a bit slow. Nervous disposition, they tell me it's incurable.” When this fails to elicit a response, he adds, “So you're calling me back to the Holy Land, is that it? Go ahead and fuckin' try, mate.”

His card companions aren't looking at their cards no more, but eyeing Tommy and Alfie like they think some conflagration of violence is about to burst between them. But if so, that's all on Tommy. Alfie's only sitting here, playing his cards.

“I'm not an errand boy,” Tommy says coolly. “I'm not calling you anywhere. I was _,_ however, considering inviting an old friend out for a meal. And perhaps an after-dinner drink.”

Here, Tommy sets the mystery bottle on the table at Alfie's elbow. No label, some gypsy concoction, perhaps. Whatever it is, it offers a more tempting oblivion that the swill he's been purchasing here.

Still, Alfie won't go easy. He shuffles in his seat and rubs his chin. “Sounds like a grand old time. After I win this game, maybe.”

Tommy doesn't sigh, but the desire to is clear in his voice. “You're holding two of your cards face-out.”

Alfie's card companions glare up at Tommy. Swine, every one of them.  
  


* * *

  
Tommy leads him to a cramped, smokey lodge called the Belt & Bull, where the brick walls are nearly black with indeterminate pollution and the patrons all smell like peat and curing lye. The crowd's hostile eyes slide slick over the two of them like their foreheads are marked with lamb's blood.

Alfie makes his way unaided across the floor of the place through a strategic relay of supports. He props himself casually against a wall; a chair; the counter.

“You said something about dinner. I'm not so gone I can't be offended, so you be careful, Thomas. This is clearly a place where men go to fuck their sisters and toast each other's sins. And I don't see any food.”

Tommy ignores him and takes hold of the key the bartender slides across the wood of the counter. He tries to take Alfie's elbow and relents the second Alfie roughly shrugs him off. A muscle twitches in his jaw – the first outward sign of frustration. Alfie kind of wants to carve it off his face and have it framed.

“Come on, then,” Tommy says, and walks to the stairs just barely visible in the back of the long room. Alfie means to make a retort, but he forgets his words by the time he makes it across the floor. No matter. More will come – they always do.

They ascend.

The room they take possession of has a full tub in the corner, and the water is still faintly steaming. Alfie doesn't want to get too close, lest the heat lure him into a dangerous spell of sleepiness, but then Tommy tells him to strip and get in and it all suddenly looks like a trap, don't it.

Alfie turns so his back is to the wall and he squints hard at him, trying to figure his game. Tommy has set himself up by the window across the room and is lighting a cigarette. Impossible to say whether that's a tell. Good play, Tommy, for utilizing such a habit that no one can ever decide if it's covering for something nefarious. Which it probably always is. Statistically.

“You smell like you've been fucking your way through every den in the east end,” Tommy says, when he notices Alfie's disinclination to comply. “You stink of sewage and sweat.”

Alfie spreads his hands. “Is that not an aroma of romance with your people?”

“Get in the fucking tub, Alfie.”

But Alfie's already distracted again. He has caught sight of his hands and the thick arcs of crud under his nails. He remembers the rule; clean hands for the dinner table, Alfie.

Tommy stares at him, unreadable as Alfie silently steps away from the wall and approaches the tub. He doesn't look away when the clothing drops.  
  


* * *

  
He awakens when his mouth and nose slide below the surface of the water and comes up spluttering.

He can tell the angle of light through the window has shifted considerably but not by how much. His thoughts feel sodden, the memory of how he came to be in this tub a trail of wet footprints rapidly evaporating. His fingers are pruned and the water is tepid; he has been in here a while.

“You sober yet?”

The voice belongs to the dappled shadow under a tree, a blade waiting for unaware passersby.

“Fucking hell, I better not be,” Alfie mutters. “Tommy, there are some things you just don't watch a man do.”

“Modesty, really?” Tommy appears in his line of sight. He is holding, of all things, a plate piled with sandwiches. He sets the plate down on a small table near the window and turns to give him a bemused look. “After everything?”

“Some things,” he insists, because bending a man over a barrel of rum and fucking him isn't the same as letting him gaze unobstructed at one's scars and abnormalities, not even close.

Tommy doesn't reply, only leans against the table and folds his arms like he is settling in for a sermon. Which, fine.

Alfie cups some water in his hands and sluices it over his head, raking his hair back from his forehead and blinking under the onslaught, trying to shake off the last of his doze and piece together the events of the past few hours. He is in a lull, the eye of the storm some seafaring men might term it, battered by the first bout and looking ahead to the next with a heavy but grim determination.

“I believe you promised me a drink,” he says through the water dripping down his face.

“I promised you an after-dinner drink,” Tommy corrects, glancing pointedly at the plate of sandwiches.

He doesn't like his tone. Tommy gets it into his head sometimes that he knows better than Alfie, that he is in a position to dictate matters. Half the swindles Alfie's ever taken him for have been borne out of spite and irritation with this exact tone of voice. Tommy really should know better by now, but he is, as ever, a man blinded by vision.

Enough. Alfie braces his forearms against the rim of the tub, muscles in his thigh bunching as he hauls himself to his feet. Water bucks at the abruptness of the move, slipping over the sides, but he pays it no mind as he steps out of the tub and crosses the room to stand before the other man.

Tommy has always been observant. He can keep his eyes trained on a man's face while not missing anything happening past the narrow band of that focus. The only sign of this awareness is the light in his eyes. The changeover, Alfie calls it. Wary to interested.

Alfie plants his feet wide like a boxer. He meets those well-trained eyes and reaches for a sandwich. “So you came running down to London like a good lad, hey, Tommy? Now why is that?”

His eyes track the disappearing sandwich like assessing the health of one of his fillys. “I had business in the area.”

Alfie makes an inquiring noise, too emphatic to be sincere. He is aware of the cool air against the damp skin on the backs of his thighs, the rapidly drying water tracks on his chest and stomach. He is aware Tommy is aware.

He finishes his sandwich. He reaches for another one, but Tommy stays his hand. Alfie looks at him sharply in warning.

He retains both the gaze and the hand as he slides to his knees. All that expensive fabric, folding and pooling on the shabby floor. This expensive man, supplicating at Alfie's feet.

“You know,” Tommy says, the beginnings of a smirk playing over his face. “Business?”

The fold of his hands over Alfie's pelvic bone could be cast in marble by one of the great masters of the art. But his mouth was pure God's work.  
  


* * *

  
“My mother, she used to take this,” Tommy says, later, after Alfie's come and dressed and finished supping. “To help with her moods. It's from my father's recipe.”

He is reclined in a chair, one leg resting on the other, cigarette lit and comfortably in hand. His eyes are on Alfie's hands around the small bottle as he carefully pours out a measure.

Alfie caps the bottle and picks up his glass, considering. He sniffs it and barks out a surprised laugh. “Gin? Well don't that explain a lot about you Shelby boys. One don't drink gin to stop the sadness, Tommy. It brings on the melancholy.” He sniffs. “Shouldn't start distilling 'til you know the basic facts of the craft.”

Tommy considers his own glass and doesn't reply for a moment, then: “Perhaps she drank it to draw the melancholy out, like an infected wound.”

Alfie says, “Maybe, maybe,” and nudges his glass against Tommy's until the other man looks at him. Alfie toasts him and says solemnly, “To your father, and his filthy enabling ways,” which surprises a short laugh out of Tommy, and they clink their glasses and drink the gin and it's on.

Alfie doesn't drink much of the gin, only enough to get the dry, piney flavor clouding his tastebuds and to make his burgeoning headache ease off down the road. He is content to start slow and allow Tommy some space to catch up.

It's clearly been a while since Tommy drank socially. Alfie can read it in the way he stares too long at his glass or the table, forgetting he has company for a spell of time. When he recovers himself, he accelerates into his next words like someone trying to push-start a stalled motor. He doesn't blink often enough, except when he's checking if Alfie noticed. (Alfie noticed.)

Too much time spent locked up in that big, ridiculous country home of his. Even the ever-reliable Arthur doesn't stop by anymore, that's what Alfie hears.

He supervises Tommy's drinking like this for perhaps an hour before the itch starts up again, the unsettled scrabbling in his mind demanding distraction, preferably destruction. How dare these walls, this city, still stand unmoved. He can't tear them down but he can try, can rip his skin and break his fingers trying. He wants to.

Tommy senses this. He narrows his eyes and watches his hands play over the table. Alfie had a neighbor who was a piano instructor when he was a lad, and she watched his hands as intently as this. But he doubts old Mrs. Gambiano had any of the thoughts Tommy was thinking right now.

“Why are you here, Tommy?” he asks again, meaning _what did that stupid Ollie tell you_?

What could he tell him? Ollie didn't know anything.

Tommy considers his words before speaking. “You know, Arthur gets in a bad way sometimes. And I lie to him. Tell him the war was a long time ago. That it's over.”

Alfie looks away, squinting out the window. He doesn't need to feign his disinterest. “Yeah, well, Arthur's a broken animal. But you find him useful that way, don't you?” And Tommy doesn't like that, Alfie can tell by the way his fingers press against the rim of his half-full glass of gin. But he still doesn't rise to the bait, so Alfie presses his point. “Apologies, Tommy. What I meant was – you did find him useful. That side of the family's still not really on speaking terms with you, right?”

“Are you trying to provoke me, Alfie?” He sounds, as ever, more curious than offended. There's always a distance to his words that Alfie wants to cross somehow, but he hasn't figured out the right move yet.

He scoffs and runs his hand through the puddle of liquor on the table, smearing the liquid into nonsense shapes that will dry quickly. “Me? Never dream of it, mate.”

Truth is, Alfie thinks Tommy envies his older brother, whose heart beats so big right out of his chest; the world fractures when he's angry; he cries when he's sad. All those emotions, right there for the taking. Some time long ago Tommy decided he wasn't allowed that. Maybe he resents Arthur for not being stronger. Alfie certainly does. Family should be more than a burden.

Thomas Shelby as a brother is a well known entity, but he wonders what sort of son he used to be; did Tommy kiss his mother goodbye every time he saw her, or did he pull back impatiently when her hands reached for his? Did he truly see her, or did his gaze slip past like she was nothing more than old furniture in the family home?

“So this isn't about the war,” Tommy says, and Alfie looks back at him. There's an assessing look on his face, a horse man testing reflexes. He tapped and Alfie kicked; no problems there.

“Everything is about the war, Tommy. Except the war, which was about nothing.” He knocks the rest of his glass back and sets it down on the table, hard. He shoves his chair back. Time for a change in scenery. “Enough gin. Enough of this room. We're going out.”

Tommy smokes and looks away, slow and deliberate. “Going to show me the sights?” he asks, and his eyes case the room like the bare walls might offer him a better deal.

Alfie heads for the door. He doesn't look over his shoulder until he reaches it and sure enough, Tommy's gaze has fetched back up on him. Sometimes Alfie feels the connection's a physical thing, like he holds a leash Tommy keeps trying to resist. The other man would hate the metaphor, which is why Alfie's saving it up for when he wants a fight.

“C'mon,” he says, tone abruptly coaxing. “let's get a drink with a little more fucking energy, hm?”  
  


* * *

  
He sets down the street at a mean pace, and Tommy ambles alongside with little appearance of effort.

“Word in London is, you've grown so bored with your well-to-do life, you've taken up crossdressing and started reading tea leaves for your whores after fucking them.”

Tommy cuts him a glance through the flow of his cigarette smoke. “Word on the canals is, you were the one who started that rumour.”

Alfie is unbothered by the accusation. “I think you could pull off a dress, Tommy. One of those numbers with the – ” he waves his hands to illustrate the dropped waist and fluttery skirts, but it's hard to tell by Tommy's expression whether he's communicating his vision clearly.

“It just looks like you're inviting me to suck your cock,” observes Tommy. So – clear enough.

The streets are different with Tommy at his side – like he's different, or the air is, or something. The street's the same crowded stinking place it always is, but walking it with Tommy, it rings with the possibility of real catastrophe. Alfie starts thinking about what can be done with two pairs of hands, what can be accomplished when you can be in two places at once.

“Where are we going?” Tommy asks when he registers the new direction and sense of purpose in their walk.

“We are going to rob someone.”

It's not like Alfie couldn't've handled this by himself, but the strategy would've been different, the planning, tedious. What's the point of being in possession of Tommy Shelby if you don't use him? Alfie had been quite cheered for a good long while when he heard about the Shelby debut to London society, all those pretty people having their night ruined by a pack of rowdy boys in long coats that stunk of coal smoke.

But does that man still exist? Alfie casts a lingering, suspicious look at the man ambling loosely at his side.

Tommy says, “Anyone in particular you have in mind? There are at least ten outfits I'd prefer not to bother with in this city.”

His voice is mildly disdainful, like he's trying to tell Alfie he should be ashamed of not having conquered the entirety of London by now. But Tommy's a big fish in a little pond who needs glasses. He never could see how big or deep this particular new pond was. Because fucking hell, but Alfie doesn't even _want_ all of London. Just the thought of all the people he'd have to deal with makes him want to reach for his revolver.

The fun is in the conquering, not the ruling thereafter. Everyone knows that.

They turn down a quiet side street that aborts after two and half blocks into a dead end. The buildings all have a restrained sort of energy, like if they will it hard enough, people will forget what neighborhood they are in.

“We stop in here first,” he announces outside a clean, nondescript green door near the mouth of the street.

The Badger is one of the oldest clients of Solomons Aerated Bread Company, and an unlikely match with its determination to avoid illicit activity. It is a pub that pretends to be nothing but a pub, which makes it a rarity. Alfie notices Tommy looking around curiously, clearly trying to read the establishment's game. But the answer lies safely concealed decades in the past, in an alley outside a now-shuttered Christian school, where Alfie spit and shook hands with a shadow-eyed schoolboy.

That small boy grew marginally into the short blond now standing behind the bar, flagrantly ignoring his patrons, who ignore him in turn. The men of The Badger are so discreet, only their maker and the bricks of the backroom know their secrets.

“Joseph,” Alfie says in greeting.

Joseph looks up from his book. His deepset eyes flick from Alfie and to Tommy and he shifts forward a little onto his elbows. “Alfie. You've come out of your way, haven't you. Checking up on our contest?”

Some men grew beards after the war to cover their scars, only to bow to the vagaries of fashion before too long. Being none too bothered about such matters, Joseph and Alfie persisted with their preferences for facial coiffure and somewhere in those hazy years it became a proving ground for their strange, whispery connection. But the other man is fighting a hopeless battle; as Alfie's beard lengthens, he'll only grow more powerful, whereas Joseph increasingly resembles a deranged [Quaker been cut off from his Friends for speaking unnatural tongues].

“Looking for Baxter Mids. You seen him lately?” He squinted at the back wall and nodded. “Give us two of a my usual.”

Joseph reached behind himself without looking and plucked up the half-empty bottle of a blackstrap elixir.

  
  


** II. Rum **  
_for fun and fucking_

  
  


“Thought it was white for bosses,” murmurs Tommy, but his hands fold around his glass anyway. He pretends not to notice Joseph studying him, but Alfie's the finest scholar on the arcane movements of those sleepy eyelids, and he sees through the neutral expression easily.

“No bosses here, Tommy. Today we are working men.” He knocks their glasses together, they drink, and Alfie nods at Joseph to pour them another. “Baxter Mids, Joseph,” he reminds him.

The barman tears his gaze away from Tommy and asks, “What do you want him for?”

Alfie doesn't cuff him for the useless response, but only because it's a sentimental kind of day. “Recompense.”

Joseph pales and glances at the other patrons – the two men huddled over a small table along the wall, and the lone drip in the corner. His lips thin, disappearing into the furrow of his golden beard. “You know what'll happen if it gets out I'm good for it?”

“Yeah, you'll have to make use of the protection you've been paying for all these years. Stop with the coy buggery, Joseph. Where is he?”

“What'd old Mids do?”

“Stole my mother's knickers off the line.”

He starts to say something and then stops. He peers at Alfie across the bar. “You mean – what, when we was back in secondary? That was ages ago, mate.”

“Mate,” Tommy repeats, mostly to himself. Alfie turns to him, and Tommy raises his eyebrows.

“What?”

He shrugs and makes an elaborate face, and Alfie realizes he must be starting to get on his level. Tommy says, “That is the most I've heard you speak to anyone in my presence who wasn't an employee. _Mate_.”


End file.
